American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  EIGHT

  The Elusive President: Washington, 1995-1996

  In the end, Clinton got not just one but three chances to sign a bill. As welfare politics moved on to the Senate in the spring of 1995, no one knew that fifteen months of battle still lay ahead, with ambushes awaiting both sides. The Republican majority, so triumphant as the bill cleared the House, turned fractured and doubting, and Clinton, hard to read as ever, worked his way back into view. In retrospect, he called the bill a highlight of his presidency. But the only reason the final version made it to his desk was that his chief antagonist, Newt Gingrich, thought that signing it would politically destroy him.

  Gingrich could push a bill through the House, but its prospects in the Senate were initially in doubt. The Senate is a graveyard for impetuous plans. The Republican majority was slimmer, and the rules gave obstructionists more sway. Bob Dole, the Republican leader, was no radical—Gingrich had once disparaged him as the “tax collector for the welfare state”—and neither was the chairman of the Finance Committee, Bob Packwood. Moynihan assured his staff that a body as august as the Finance Committee would never abolish AFDC. Then it did, just like that. Whatever affection Dole felt for the governors was quickened by his launch of a presidential campaign that needed their endorsements and mailing lists. Packwood had his own reasons to toe the party line. He was under investigation for sexual harassment and trying, in vain, to save his seat. The Left had looked for a Senate firewall. By the spring of 1995, the firewall was on fire, too.

  Among Democrats, all eyes turned in one perplexing direction, - toward that of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was the committee’s ranking Democrat, and he had groomed an image as the very soul of social policy. Outside the Senate he was renowned for his mix of charm and erudition. Inside the Capitol, he was equally known for his thin record in the low art of passing bills. Aghast at the move to abolish AFDC, Moynihan had neither the instinct nor talent for a backroom fight to save it. It probably wouldn’t have mattered, anyway, but it would take a dramatist to fully capture the ironies. He had spent decades demanding a national debate about fatherless families, only to despair when it finally occurred. He had spent decades feuding with the welfare Left, only to be left as its most prominent ally. Moynihan passed the spring in sputtering disbelief, then emerged in the fall of 1995 as the voice of national conscience. In speeches from the Senate floor, he was eloquent, learned, entertaining, and wholly ineffective. He may not have changed a single vote. But he did give the only speech published in The New York Review of Books. “Nothing I did connected,” he later wrote, not without a trace of pride.

  As a capstone to one of the great careers in public life, Moynihan’s role in the welfare debate will be scrutinized for decades. Substantively, his worldview proceeded like this: “illegitimacy” (a normative term he preferred over “nonmarital births”) was a profound new problem that the country had ignored at its peril. It was profound because it drove other problems, like crime, drugs, and indiscriminate rebellion against authority, especially among males. It was new in that it had exploded over the past four decades. But since it afflicted most industrialized countries, it couldn’t have been driven by AFDC, one small American program. As a vast, disturbing condition, the rise of “dependency” deserved above all to be studied and discussed. “To ask questions. There it is,” he had written, in praise of the thinker’s life. As for what to do, Moynihan had never been sure. He had started his career pushing government jobs; embraced a guaranteed income; then turned to a more cautious services strategy, hoping that education and training would nudge poor mothers to work. Still, he had never been entirely convinced that single mothers ought to work, especially when their children were young; the jobs he had sought were for men. “I have spent much of my lifetime on this subject and have only grown more perplexed,” he said.

  One topic for future Moynihan studies concerns his gloom about the welfare poor. Not for him the polite talk that people on aid are “just like me and you.” He referred to welfare recipients as “paupers—not a pretty word, but not a pretty condition”—or even “failed - persons.” Who knows what darkness from his ragged childhood shaded his views; his father deserted when Moynihan was ten, and the family fell from middle-class respectability to a series of cold-water flats. Moynihan would raise his hard-knocks past when it proved politically useful. But one knock he almost never mentioned was the Moynihans’ own stay on welfare. What he really seemed to believe was that most welfare families would never be able to cope, and a mix of duty and self-interest demanded they be minimally maintained. “I just do what the Catholic bishops tell me,” he snapped to a reporter one day. There was something refreshing about Moynihan’s refusal to romanticize ghetto life. And something disturbing, too: the trio drawing checks on First Street weren’t nearly as helpless as he believed. “To be dependent is to hang,” he liked to say. Angie didn’t think she was hanging by her check. Just cashing it.

  After three decades of prescient forecasts, Moynihan was essentially left to argue that the country faced an earthshaking new problem, about which it should do nothing. With a bill speeding through Congress, that was an impossible stance to sustain. “Dear Senator,” began a letter from an aide, Paul Offner. “I write to plead, even at this late date, for the introduction of a Moynihan welfare bill. . . . Democrats in the Senate are floundering. . . . you are the only one who can pull this together. . . . [W]ithout a proposal of our own—so members can say that they voted for welfare reform—we won’t be able to hold our members. . . . the stakes are so high that we can’t afford not to fight.” Two weeks later, Moynihan unveiled the status-quo proposal Offner feared: more money for the JOBS program. There were no cosponsors.

  That left the Senate Democrats like a lost school of fish—ready to bolt, but to where? With neither Clinton nor Moynihan to point the way, Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, united the caucus, but he did so only with another move right (accepting “hard” time limits of five years). Clinton hailed the plan at a White House event, where Moynihan showed up, declared himself “on board,” and warned it - could prove “ruinous.”

  As the Democrats shambled toward their unity show, Republican unity suddenly collapsed, giving Clinton and the Democrats time to regroup. The bill seemed headed for quick passage when it cleared the Finance Committee in May. Within a few weeks, Dole was prepared to start debating it on the Senate floor. Then he lunched with the full caucus of Republican senators, and the next day he announced the floor debate was off: the conservatives were up in arms. “I absolutely intend to filibuster it,” said Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina, with enough support for a credible threat. Chief among the conservatives’ complaints was that the measure failed to combat the “real” welfare problem of “illegitimacy,” since as a pure block grant, it let states decide what, if anything, to do. They wanted provisions like a mandatory “family cap,” which would prohibit states from increasing grants when recipients had additional children. The uncivil war, which bogged the bill down for the rest of the summer, even featured as one of its unlikely sideshows a melee over the bill’s preamble. Moderates wanted it to call marriage a foundation of society; conservatives wanted to call it the foundation. The “the” camp won, but only after Dole’s centrist chief of staff, Sheila Burke, the “a” foundation leader, found herself pummeled in the conservative press as “Hillary Lite” and a font of “militant feminism.” “Bring Me the Head of Sheila Burke” ran the Time account.

  Once more in the thick of the fray was Robert Rector, who, operating from his office at the Heritage Foundation, staffed the illegitimacy debate as a one-man think tank and tactician. (He drafted the Faircloth alternative and his angry showdown with Sheila Burke helped spill the story into the press.) In seeking a debate over family structure, Rector had well-founded concerns; the problems of the inner city couldn’t be solved by single mothers alone, even if they were working. The trouble was that no one had a clue of how to legislate a dad. The challenge of movi
ng 5 million recipients to work was huge, but it proceeded from a template. Past programs. Evaluations. Offices and staff. In looking to deter nonmarital births, Congress had no place to start—not even any certainty that welfare played a causal role. Scholarly efforts to link welfare payments to birth rates had shown a faint influence at best; though welfare benefits had fallen for decades, nonmarital births had continued to rise. Maybe work itself would curb nonmarital births, by prompting women like Angie to demand more from their men. But even Rector made few claims for the additional measures he sought: a ban on aid to unmarried teens; an “illegitimacy bonus” (for states that cut nonmarital births); and the “family cap.” “These moves were more to call attention to the issue than to provide a silver bullet,” he said. “Because I don’t think we know how to solve it.”

  The issue was politically perilous, too. Given the black-white disparities, a politician attacking nonmarital births still risked being called a racist. (Seventy percent of black children were born outside marriage in 1995, compared to 21 percent for whites.) Plus, the issue involved sexual responsibility—and how many politicians wanted to invite scrutiny of that? In demanding work, the authors of the “Personal Responsibility Act” practiced what they preached; some legislators worked so hard, they slept on their office couches. But someone charting the main players’ sex lives would have found them having an affair with a junior staffer (Gingrich); having an affair with an intern (Clinton); fending off eighteen accusations of unwanted sexual advances (Packwood); or fondling a prostitute’s toe (Dick Morris). That was part of Rector’s gripe: without an effort by social conservatives, the issue would go ignored. He was looking for a “polemical beach-head”—a way to keep the subject in view—and with a handful of Senate allies making speeches all summer, he succeeded beyond his dreams. Faircloth: “The problem that is destroying this whole country is illegitimacy.” John Ashcroft: “Illegitimacy is a threat to our nation and our culture.” Phil Gramm: “We’re going to end up losing America as we know it.” There were other issues dividing the GOP, including child-care money and block-grant funding for high-growth Sunbelt states. But after a summer of marathan talks, Dole settled most of them. On the fractious subject of what to do about unmarried women having kids, all he could muster was a plan to take rival amendments to the floor. “We’re just going to have a jump ball,” he said. “But you still stay in the game if you lose.”

  When the Senate reconvened in September 1995, two things were clear: a bill would pass, and it would amount to a conservative revolution. After six decades of federal control, Congress would vote to hand welfare to the states, with capped funding, vast discretion, and lifetime limits of five years. The remaining disputes were secondary or symbolic. The only question was whether they would be settled in a way that mollified Democrats, giving the bill a bipartisan label and increasing the chances that Clinton would sign it. (On the “jump ball” over the illegitimacy issues, the conservatives mostly lost.) Roused from his torpor, Moynihan took to the Senate floor to remind colleagues that he owned a pen that President Kennedy had used to sign a bill deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill. That law, too, had bet on a local safety net, and it had left homeless schizophrenics wandering the streets. “In ten years’ time we will wonder where these ragged children came from,” he warned. “Why are they sleeping on grates?”

  But the summer brought increasing signs that Clinton wanted a deal. In early August, his press secretary praised the emerging Senate plan. A few days later Clinton praised it, too, saying, “I cannot believe we can’t reach an agreement here.” That same day he met with his strategist, Dick Morris, who had written to advise him to “[b]rag about cuts in AFDC levels” and “never, never veto.” At the White House, Bruce Reed gained control of the issue and embarked on a strategy one ally called “building a better block grant,” accepting the states’ rights approach with a few alterations. They entered the Senate debate with four priorities and quickly made progress on three: a “performance bonus” (to states that placed recipients in jobs); a “contingency fund” (that increased spending in a recession); and a “maintenance-of-effort” rule (that required states to keep up spending). As the debate spilled into its sixth day, September 14, the Democrats’ fourth priority remained in doubt: more money for child care.

  In any extended negotiation, minor matters can take on make-or-break weight. The disputed sums were small, in financial and policy terms. But the bigger issues had been resolved, and child care was something that voters could grasp. The Democrats demanded an extra $3 billion over five years: not a penny less. Republicans offered less: $3 billion over seven years. The Democrats’ negotiator, Christopher Dodd, stood on the Senate floor and warned that within a few hours an agreement could be dead. With chances for a bill fading by the moment, Dole sprang a surprise: $3 billion, five years.

  “That is the first time this Senator heard that offer,” sputtered Dodd.

  “My view is that this is what the Senator wanted,” Dole said.

  “We can put in a quorum call,” Dodd replied.

  Hardly a sound bite to ring in the new age. But next to “end welfare,” those may have been the saga’s most important words: a bill that Senate Democrats would support was a bill that Clinton would sign. Watching on C-Span from his White House office, a startled Bruce Reed called every Democratic office he could reach: Take the deal! When the Senate reconvened the following morning, Friday, September 15, the two sides had a pact. And twenty-four hours later, Clinton added his blessing in his weekly radio address. “We are now within striking distance,” he said. “The Senate showed wisdom and courage.” When the vote was tallied the following week—87 to 12—it brought high fives in the West Wing.

  The Left came alive with panic: a Democratic president was about to achieve Ronald Reagan’s welfare dream. Bishops wrote letters. Academics signed petitions. Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund published an “open letter,” asking Clinton, “Do you think the Old Testament prophets . . . or Jesus Christ—would support such policies?” I shared the alarm, writing a piece in the form of a future encyclopedia entry that charted the suffering of the postwelfare poor. But the more telling sign is what didn’t occur—no mass demonstrations, no Capitol sit-ins, no recipients with ardent demands. Nothing to suggest much political pain in signing the bill. A call from Robert Rector could get the Christian Coalition mobilized. A call from Marian Edelman was a call from Marian Edelman. It would be taken at the pinnacle of power and respectfully ignored.

  The most notable challenge came from inside the administration and consisted not of placards but computer printouts. At the Department of Health and Human Services, Wendell Primus had revived an old habit from his career on Capitol Hill, of estimating how many children the proposed budget cuts would push into poverty. As the Senate reached its deal, his model spit out a number: 1.1 million. Analysts produce numbers all the time; the extraordinary thing is what happened next. Donna Shalala, the HHS secretary, raced to the White House, found Clinton in the hall, and stuck the study in his hand. She knew he was about to tape a radio address praising the Senate bill, and she wanted to head him off. “Clinton’s tendency is to cut the deal too fast,” she later said. “Anything I could hand him to make him slow down and think, I wanted to do.” Clinton expressed surprise at the numbers but praised the bill anyway, citing the lawmakers’ “wisdom and courage” for passing the “right kind” of reform. But when the study reached Bruce Reed a few hours later, he knew he had a problem—a piece of paper in presidential hands that made Clinton seem willing to impoverish kids. He assumed it would leak, and Primus did, too. (He later called the study “a stick of dynamite” lodged in the White Hall walls.) A month later Moynihan got a tip and demanded the study’s release. With reporters giving chase, Reed orchestrated an absurd line—there is no poverty study—the idea being that since it hadn’t passed clearance, it wasn’t really a “study.” Meanwhile, the nonexistent study appeared in the Los Angeles Times
. While the lies were clumsy and bald, Reed had a substantive point: the study, for all its sophistication, was still a stab at the unknowable. It modeled the impact the law would have if past patterns of behavior remained. But the whole argument for the bill was that recipients would change: faced with unprecedented restrictions on aid, they would work more, earn more, perhaps even marry. No one could say for certain who was right. Not even an HHS computer. Trapped in its ruse, the White House agreed to redo the study and produced similar results. Yet the day the official numbers were released Clinton’s press secretary said the president “may have to accept that bill anyway.” To those who thought Clinton had abandoned principle, the affair only served to offer fresh evidence.